Tri-city Mayors Discuss Incinerator, Tourism

May 30, 1985|by DAN HARTZELL, The Morning Call

The status of the Lehigh Valley trash incinerator, areawide tourism promotion and municipal tax reform were the main topics discussed at yesterday's tri-city mayors' meeting, attended by the chief executives of Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton.

Bethlehem Mayor Paul Marcincin was host for yesterday's session in the Hotel Bethlehem; the meetings are alternated among the three cities.

At a press conference following the meeting, the leaders said they had reviewed a progress report on the electricity-generating trash incinerator which the cities hope to have on line in Bethlehem within the next 3-5 years.

The Lehigh Valley Solid Waste Authority, composed of members of the cities' administrative staffs, has been formed to develop the plant in the face of the area's mounting landfill crisis.

Easton Mayor Salvatore Panto Jr. said the executives are "very pleased" with the progress being made on the plant, as the authority is completing work with its consultant on a "request for proposals" of plant the cities want. It should be completed and advertised for bidswithin two months, Panto said.

Since the request is not yet complete, some details are not yet decided, the mayors said. However, they agreed the plant will use the mass-burning type of technology, in which virtually all types of garbage are burned with little or no separation.

The plant also will be designed to process sludge from area waste water treatment plants, officials have said. Marcincin added that the capacity of the plant will be between 500 and 750 tons per day, as consultants have suggested.

Allentown Mayor Joseph Daddona said that James Ritter, the former state representative who is government liaison coordinator for Allentown and Lehigh County, is lobbying for legislation in Harrisburg designed to control landfill costs in areas where municipalities are limited to one or few disposal sites. The mayor predicted that such legislation would be introduced soon by an unspecified local legislator.

Tax reform is a recurring theme at the tri-city mayors' meetings, begun several years ago in a spirit of areawide cooperation and held three times annually.

The mayors reiterated their complaints that state law restricting municipalities primarily to property taxes as a source of general revenue, then capping the amount the cities can tax by placing a maximum millage rate on property taxes, restricts local options. As cities near the amount of the cap, they won't know which way to turn to raise additional needed revenue.

While most local state legislators, as well as the Pennsylvania League of Cities and other lobbying groups, greatly favor tax reform proposals which have been around for years, legislation has been slow in coming, apparently because it is resisted by legislators representing suburban and rural constituents, Panto said.

Daddona explained that one favored proposal would be to enact a 0.25- percent wage tax, thus widening the taxable base extensively to include people who work within the cities but live outside of them. This would reduce the share of the load on property owners, including the elderly and others on fixed income, who are proportionally overburdened, Daddona said.

As only one example, he pointed out that suburban residents who work in the cities travel to work on roads cleared of snow by city crews, but those crews and that snow removal equipment are paid for substantially by city property owners. The percentage wage tax, or "municipal services tax" as Marcincin calls it, would provide that users of the services pay more equal shares of the costs, the mayors argue.

The mayors reiterated their on-going push for a regional approach to tourism development by unanimously rejecting the notion that Bethlehem develop a tourism industry more or less individually.

Referring to a plan reportedly developed to stress tourism development in historic Bethlehem and being considered by the Bethlehem Area Chamber of Commerce, the mayors rejected the idea of focusing tourism promotion primarily on Bethlehem or any other single municipality.

"Any effort by separate splinter groups . . . would not be supported," said Daddona, with Panto and Marcincin in agreement.

"The two counties and three cities are funding" tourism promotion, Panto said, adding that individual promotional schemes by "splinter groups" might jeopardize such funding.